The official list of Republicans and conservatives jumping ship,pointing fingers, or otherwise abandoning the McCain campaign

40 entries and growing • by Jed Lewison and Barath Raghavan

(here are just three, go to the link to see the rest)

Michelle Malkin (Mon Oct 13):

Michelle Malkin expresses her disappointment in McCain after learning that "John McCain had no problem calling ACORN members his friends during his ill-fated illegal alien shamnesty crusade." She concludes, "We're Screwed '08."

Former Republican Governor of Wisconsin, said it would be difficult for Mr. McCain to win in his state but not impossible, particularly if he campaigned in conservative Democratic parts of the state. Asked if he was happy with Mr. McCain's campaign, Mr. Thompson replied, "No," and he added, "I don't know who is."

...and Buckley got the boot from the magazine his father founded because of his endorsement. See the link at the bottom of the page.

I often go to Truthdig, a site similar to this one, and read different topics of interest. The topics are followed by comments made by readers like me. There's a report at Truthdig entitled "MCCAIN'S MOB." It talks about how McCain's "base" is so "red meat," and rabid, demanding that McCain start "hitting" Obama with the Ayers rumors, among shouts of "kill him."

Two of the comments made in response to that report are below. They both raise some excellent points:

Quote:

By H. B., October 14 (Unregistered commenter)

Republicans know that it is human nature to latch onto the negative - often with a perverse kind of joy. That’s how they know that smears and lies actually DO work.

How many people want to watch “good news”? It’s the bad stuff, the juicy scandals, the spectacular crimes, that draw peoples’ attention.

The McCain/Palin ticket “didn’t even blink” when supporters at their rallies yelled out “Terrorist!” or “Traitor!” or “Kill him!” - they just pretended it had never happened. To supporters with that kind of mindframe, their saying nothing is a way of saying, “go for it.”

It is inexcusable for people who are candidates for the two most powerful positions on the planet to regard silence as an adequate response to such raw, murderous hate. Any civilized person would have stopped right there and castigated the person yelling that stuff. The silence was a virtual approval of the attitudes being voiced. They were only too happy to take full advantage of the racist elements among them. After all, they form a BIG chunk of their “base.”

The very fact that there ARE people of that kind of mindset supporting the Republicans says a whole LOT about the Republican leaders, themselves.

The comment made by John Lewis was entirely on point. Without ever once saying anything to favor crimes against blacks, he accomplished it - as much by what he didn’t say as by what he did. It was his “implied” approval of violence on blacks that resulted in violence on blacks.

They’ve now eased down on it somewhat. I imagine their legal advisers had some serious warnings for them. But that cat’s already out of the bag: McCain and Palin would love it if Obama just “went away.”

Because of their tacit approval of “Kill him!” and the others, these candidates are VERY MUCH culpable, if someone takes a potshot at Obama. They were the silent “permission-givers.” Just like Wallace was. You can incite people to violence as much by silence (at the right time) as by saying something overtly. These events have made it quite plain to many Americans that neither McCain nor Palin would cry too much of “something bad” happened to Obama. And they’d be truly stupid not to know that MANY of their own supporters would gladly try to “make it so.” Such failure to call down those people is reprehensible - for both candidates.

Can you even IMAGINE Obama letting similar comments from his supporters just - go by? He’d be all over them, peeling their skin verbally.

I DO have to criticize the author, though. Extremism is ALWAYS a vice, even in defense of country. Vigorous efforts in defense of it, yes, but extremism - NO. Extremism means going too far. One case of Bush’s extremism “in defense of country” took the form of torture. Not acceptable. If rape, pillage, culture destruction, torture, or genocide are deemed necessary in defense of country, the country isn’t one worth defending. Not with “values” like that.

Quote:

joel ichiro said:

Why would Obama get himself acquainted with ex-terrorist? I am not saying he is, but would you take that chance?

In that case, is University of Illinois a terrorist organization for allowing that same “terrorist” to be a professor of education for many years? Ayers is highly respected in the Chicago area on matters involving education. Obama is deeply into education himself. If Ayers is a terrorist, he should be living in a social and professional VACUUM. But he isn’t, is he? He’s respected and respectable in Chicago for the work he’s done in the field of education - all these years. Why shouldn’t Obama respect him, too? Even so, as happened, they never became close friends, so how does it reflect at ALL on Obama? If it reflects “terrorist” on Obama, then it should reflect likewise on ALL of Ayers’ colleagues, neighbors and friends. It doesn’t. Have you ever had to deal with people whose politics you dislike? I doubt anyone could answer an honest “no” to that one.

I think it's rather amazing that McCain is now willing to criticize and denigrate what he approved and embraced a few years ago. All McCain wants is the presidency. He has no idea what he'll do once he gets it, but that's not really important to his ego, is it?

Conducting the orchestra will be Lee Greenwood and when he decides he's not going to do it anymore, Chuck Norris will come up and knock him around a little. McCain will be cheering him on because he likes to be ANGRY and flash his eyes and smirk.

I think McCain did more damage to his chances tonight by his comments on Roe. v. Wade and abortion. His overall demeanor was, again, very disrespectful towards Obama, addressing him as "you" more often than by his name. McCain's touting Sarah Palin was again more like a proud papa's bragging than listing someone's qualifications to hold the second highest office in the land. Someone please tell McCain that autism and Downs Syndrome aren't the same things!

_________________

"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."Honore de Balzac

"Democrats work to help people who need help. That other party, they work for people who don't need help. That's all there is to it."~Harry S. Truman

Michael A. Smerconish, Esq. is a conservative and he has decided to endorse Senator Barack Obama for President of the United States.

"I’ve decided," he said. "My conclusion comes after reading the candidates’ memoirs and campaign platforms, attending both party conventions, interviewing both men multiple times, and watching all primary and general election debates.

"John McCain is an honorable man who has served his country well. But he will not get my vote. For the first time since registering as a Republican 28 years ago, I’m voting for a Democrat for president.

John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain—who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic, graffiti on a marble bust.

As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.

I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.

Back to MM. I don't think she's jumping ship as much as jumping up-and-down on it since she feels the McCain camp has been inept in really trying to hammer at the ACORN voter fraud thing. She thinks she's got the October surprise. But she's in for a big surprise because the Justice department hasn't much voter fraud in terms of votes.

Quote:

There have been several documented and widely publicized instances in which registration forms have been fraudulently completed and submitted. But it is extraordinarily difficult to find reported cases in which individuals have submitted registration forms in someone else's name in order to impersonate them at the polls. Furthermore, most reports of registration fraud do not actually claim that the fraud happens so that ineligible people can vote at the polls. Indeed, we are aware of no recent substantiated case in which registration fraud has resulted in fraudulent votes being cast.

And Obama's camp is playing hide-the-ball at all. They've actually contacted Mukasey to expand his department's role in investigating the fraud allegations.

When the economic crisis broke, I found John McCain bouncing all over the place. In those first few crisis days, he was impetuous, inconsistent, and imprudent; ending up just plain weird. Having worked with Ronald Reagan for seven years, and been with him in his critical three summits with Gorbachev, I’ve concluded that that’s no way a president can act under pressure.

Second is judgment. The most important decision John McCain made in his long campaign was deciding on a running mate.

That decision showed appalling lack of judgment. Not only is Sarah Palin not close to being acceptable in high office—I would not have hired her for even a mid-level post in the arms-control agency. But that selection contradicted McCain’s main two, and best two, themes for his campaign—Country First, and experience counts. Neither can he credibly claim, post-Palin pick.

Conservative Christopher Hitchens is voting for Obama

I suppose it could be said, as Michael Gerson has alleged, that the Obama campaign's choice of the word erratic to describe McCain is also an insinuation. But really, it's only a euphemism. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear had to feel sorry for the old lion on his last outing and wish that he could be taken somewhere soothing and restful before the night was out. The train-wreck sentences, the whistlings in the pipes, the alarming and bewildered handhold phrases—"My friends"—to get him through the next 10 seconds. I haven't felt such pity for anyone since the late Adm. James Stockdale humiliated himself as Ross Perot's running mate. And I am sorry to have to say it, but Stockdale had also distinguished himself in America's most disastrous and shameful war, and it didn't qualify him then and it doesn't qualify McCain now.

Republican Congressman Jim Leach is voting for Obama

"Like many, I'm astounded at Barack Obama's meteoric rise as a candidate, but I have no doubt that his is the leadership we need and that the world is crying out for," Basically from my perspective, this is simply not a time for politics as usual. The portfolio of issues that are going to be passed on to the next president will be as daunting as any since the Great Depression and World War II and that means that the case for inspiring new political leadership and a social ethic has seldom been more self-evident

Susan Eisenhower is voting for Obama

Given Obama's support among young people, I believe that he will be most invested in defending the interests of these rising generations and, therefore, the long-term interests of this nation as a whole. Without his leadership, our children and grandchildren are at risk of growing older in a marginalized country that is left to its anger and divisions. Such an outcome would be an unacceptable legacy for any great nation.

Well, every vote for Obama is important, but I think he could do without that goddamned neocon's vote. Those neocons stick together like Gorilla glue on a piece of wood, and Neocon Extraordinaire Bill Kristol had a hell of a lot to do with Palin's being chosen as McCain's running mate.

Two things Obama has, though, that McCain does not.. BRAINS and he's surrounded himself and his campaign with extremely intelligent people. They can smell a neocon a hundred miles away...and act accordingly.

_________________

"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."Honore de Balzac

"Democrats work to help people who need help. That other party, they work for people who don't need help. That's all there is to it."~Harry S. Truman

Well, every vote for Obama is important, but I think he could do without that goddamned neocon's vote. Those neocons stick together like Gorilla glue on a piece of wood, and Neocon Extraordinaire Bill Kristol had a hell of a lot to do with Palin's being chosen as McCain's running mate.

Two things Obama has, though, that McCain does not.. BRAINS and he's surrounded himself and his campaign with extremely intelligent people. They can smell a neocon a hundred miles away...and act accordingly.

Not all the Republicans supporting Obama are neo-cons. There are some moderates -- I think they were once called Rockefeller Republicans -- supporting him and we should welcome them.

CC Goldwater

Being Barry Goldwater's granddaughter and living in Arizona, one would assume that I would be voting for our state's senator, John McCain. I am still struck by certain 'dyed in the wool' Republicans who are on the fence this election, as it seems like a no-brainer to me.

Myself, along with my siblings and a few cousins, will not be supporting the Republican presidential candidates this year. We believe strongly in what our grandfather stood for: honesty, integrity, and personal freedom, free from political maneuvering and fear tactics. I learned a lot about my grandfather while producing the documentary, Mr. Conservative Goldwater on Goldwater. Our generation of Goldwaters expects government to provide for constitutional protections. We reject the constant intrusion into our personal lives, along with other crucial policy issues of the McCain/Palin ticket.

Susan Eisenhower

I have decided I can no longer be a registered Republican. For the first time in my life I announced my support for a Democratic candidate for the presidency, in February of this year. This was not an endorsement of the Democratic platform, nor was it a slap in the face to the Republican Party. It was an expression of support specifically for Senator Barack Obama. I had always intended to go back to party ranks after the election and work with my many dedicated friends and colleagues to help reshape the GOP, especially in the foreign-policy arena. But I now know I will be more effective focusing on our national and international problems than I will be in trying to reinvigorate a political organization that has already consumed nearly all of its moderate “seed corn.” And now, as the party threatens to trivialize what promised to be a serious debate on our future direction, it will alienate many young people who might have come into party ranks.

My decision came at the end of last week when it was demonstrated to the nation that McCain and this Bush White House have learned little in the last five years. They mishandled what became a crisis in the Caucasus, and this has undermined U.S. national security. At the same time, the McCain camp appears to be comfortable with running an unworthy Karl Rove–style political campaign. Will the McCain operation, and its sponsors, do anything to win?

This is not really about Sarah Palin herself. She was McCain’s choice. He is the author of this Palin comedy we now have. It was the most reckless, irresponsible choice I’ve ever seen a candidate for president make. John McCain knows as well as anyone that Sarah Palin has no business being anywhere near the Oval Office. I’m sorry, it’s got nothing to do with the fact that she wears skirts — she’s grossly unqualified. The choice itself is sexist.